WiMax promise finally fulfilled for city centre residents

Rss |

Homepage |

E-mail this article |

WiMax outdoor receiver.

1:00 am, May 19, 2008
WiMax promise finally fulfilled for city centre residents

By Tim Chapman

Wireless broadband has been a long time coming to Manchester. But service provider Freedom4 is now preparing for a marketing push and roll-out of coverage that should see its WiMax service available across the city centre.

It's been over two years since internet service provider Pipex and Intel Capital, the investment wing of the US IT giant, promised to deploy wireless broadband across Manchester and London by 2007. The Pipex group has since been dismantled, but the service project is being continued by two former divisions, Freedom4 and Vialtus.

Direct access

WiMax is a different proposition to the familiar local wireless networks, which connects computers to a base station, which is in turn plugged into a digital subscriber line (DSL) or cable connection. WiMax does away with this hard-wired connection, providing direct access from a wireless router.

Freedom4 currently has nine WiMax cells installed around Manchester, each covering around one square kilometre. Three are in the city centre, with the rest dotted around suburbs from Moss Side to Cheetham Hill.

The firm plans to install further cells to cover well over 250,000 premises by the end of the year.

“We're concentrating on the city centre, and where SMEs are based,” said Brendan O'Rourke, chief operating officer at Freedom4.

WiMax has been called a technology in search of a market, but O'Rourke said that SMEs are the main target of the marketing campaign it is launching this month in partnership with local resellers. “We've learned a lot about where we can fit within the market.”

O'Rourke expects some initial take-up from businesses adopting WiMax as a back-up to their own wired broadband.

“There's always a concern about using new technologies, but using this as a back-up is a way of testing the technology very cheaply,” he said.

Industry experts say the time might have come for WiMax. “We're just at that stage of the adoption surge where we'll suddenly see it springing up all over the place,” said NCC Group's technical director Paul Vlissidis.

COMMENTS? manchesternews@crain.com